Proud

by Ibtihaj Muhammad

  Jeremy had taken advantage of the fact that Ms. Murphy had stepped out into the hall to speak with another student.

  I tried to hold back the tears, but they were already forming. My arm stung, but I was also seething. “I’m going to tell my brother you hit me,” I said.

  Jeremy shrugged and walked away. I had to force myself to remain calm and try to breathe normally. How dare he hit me like that and then act like nothing had happened! I couldn’t understand how kids could be so cruel for no reason. I tried my best to focus on my painting, but all I could see was red. I held my face down so no one could see the hot, angry tears running down my face. I tried to clear my mind of revenge. I wiped the tears off my face with my shirtsleeve and tried to pull myself together. “Deep breath, Ibtihaj,” I told myself, remembering what my mom said to me the day I came home in the third grade after Delia Sanders and her brother Justin threw snowballs at me after school. She made me take a deep breath and reminded me that Allah rewards the kind. “So, let it go,” she’d said. And I did, but I also told Qareeb what had happened, and he helped me ambush Delia and Justin with an arsenal of snowballs the following week after school.

  As soon as the last bell rang, I found my brother.

  “What’s up?” he said when he saw me.

  “I need your help,” I said, pulling him away from his group of friends.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “What happened?” Qareeb could tell by my voice and entire demeanor that I was upset. He knew that since I’d started wearing my hijab every day I was a target more than ever. And even though he was one of the cool kids at our school, his popularity didn’t rub off on me.

  I told Qareeb about Jeremy hitting me in the arm and calling me names. “And I said that I’d tell you what he did, but he said he didn’t care, Qareeb. You have to talk to him and let him know he can’t put his hands on me.”

  Qareeb looked angry. I was so grateful I had a brother who wasn’t afraid to stick up for me. At home I spent a lot of time wishing Qareeb would calm down, because he was so hyperactive, but at times like this I appreciated my brother and all of his fearlessness.

  “Which one is he?” Qareeb asked, already looking around the back lawn of the school where all of the students were dismissed.

  I scanned the crowd of students pouring out of the middle school building and quickly spotted Jeremy. I had no idea how things were going to go down. I wasn’t the type of person to engineer fights between seventh-grade bullies and my brother after school, but I was still mad. All I could think about was getting Jeremy to leave me alone, once and for all. I wasn’t angry just for that day when he punched me, it was for every day he found a way to hurt or humiliate me in front of my classmates. I pointed Jeremy out to Qareeb. “That’s him,” I said, “the ugly one with the red shirt.”

  My brother gave me a look. “Are you sure he punched you on purpose?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said with confidence. “He teases me all the time.”

  “All right, come on,” he said to me and started pushing through the crowd toward where Jeremy was standing with a bunch of his friends.

  “Yo, Jeremy, why’d you punch my sister?” Qareeb said, getting straight to the point.

  “I didn’t punch her hard,” Jeremy stammered. “I was just playing around and—”

  Before Jeremy could finish his sentence, KA-POW! Qareeb punched Jeremy in the arm.

  “Don’t you ever touch my sister again,” Qareeb said with extra grit in his voice.

  I don’t know if it was the pain, the embarrassment of being punched by an eighth-grader in front of his friends, or a combination of the two, but Jeremy started crying. Watching the boy cry didn’t make me feel as good as I thought it would, but Jeremy never bothered me again.

  But there were always others to take his place.

  There was Jonathan Grady. He was a year older than me. He knew my brother, but that didn’t stop him from finding ways to torture me. He followed me home from school on a day when I couldn’t find Qareeb. I left the school grounds with a small group of my friends, but since I lived the farthest from school, I had to walk the last two blocks alone. I was only a block from home when I felt a kick from behind. Jonathan Grady had sneaked up on me and kicked my brand-new backpack so hard, he kicked a hole in it. He ran away laughing, and I cried the rest of the way home.

  Looking back, I’d say middle school bullies got the best of my tears. My grandmother used to tell me, “Baby, if you keep crying so much, you’re going to run out of tears.” Everyone in my family, in fact, knew I cried a lot; it was usually because I was known as a bit of a drama queen around the house. But I didn’t bring the troubles I had at school home with me. I tried to keep those tears to myself.

  Usually when I got home, my father would be there. Because he worked the night shift, he would make sure we got busy doing our homework, and by the time he had to leave for work, my mother would be walking in the door. There was usually so much going on in our house after school with five kids running around that most of the time I didn’t even have time to tell my parents about the problems I was having at school, and usually by the time I was safely ensconced in our family bubble, the problems didn’t seem that bad. It didn’t seem worth it to burden my parents with my middle-school issues. Qareeb told me to stand up for myself if I had to, but I didn’t want to stand up or speak out or anything. I just wanted to be like my friends who could go to school and not have to worry about being harassed over their religion. They were free to be themselves, and that’s all I wanted, too.

  “Mommy, do I have to wear my hijab today?” I asked once, early one morning after getting dressed.

  My mother stopped what she was doing and gave me a look; I could not tell if it was pity or shame or disappointment.

  “Yes, you have to wear it,” my mother said. “It might be hard at times, but remember all of this is Allah’s plan. And I know it feels hard for you now, but I promise you as you get older, you’ll understand that wearing hijab is a gift, not a punishment.”

  Now I know my mother was right. But the kid in me who just wanted to fit in with her friends wasn’t convinced. I guess a part of me knew that even without my hijab, there would still be other reasons people didn’t like me. For instance, there was a group of girls who loved to tease me and tell me as often as they could that I wasn’t “really Black” because I talked “white” and did well in school.

  Maplewood tracked students by ability, and I was always in the track for advanced learners. By seventh grade, the tracks were well established, and the smart kids had all of their classes together. Usually I was one of a small number of Black kids in these classes. Maplewood is a diverse town, but in the classrooms, segregation was in full effect, and I was on the wrong side of the color line. I was quite well versed in being the odd girl out in every situation. The only Black girl, the only Muslim girl, the only hijabi.

  So I put on my hijab that day and never asked if I could leave it at home again. I tolerated the teasing and tried to keep my attention on the things I loved about school, which were pretty much everything else. It wasn’t always easy, but I would tell myself that if I got good grades and I was the smartest in the class, then people like Jonathan and Jeremy could eat each and every one of my perfect report cards.

  As soon I turned eleven, my mother enrolled me in summer pre-college programs at places like the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the University of Medicine and Dentistry, specifically targeted to high-achieving Black and Latino children. These summer courses were a soothing balm for the hits I’d taken during the school year. In these classes I was praised for being smart and hardworking. Everyone around me looked like me: brown. Even the teachers. There were even other Muslim students in the mix, so I didn’t stand out at all. I could be myself and never worried that an ignorant person would say something mean to me.

  My parents had already decided I would be a doctor because I did well in math and science at school, and th
ese programs were to help me get on that path. Like many parents, especially those in the Muslim community, my parents demanded academic excellence from their children. If we didn’t bring home all A’s on our report cards it was understood we’d receive some sort of punishment. My parents ran a tight ship, and I had no reason to believe they weren’t serious about their demands, so I didn’t dare bring home any grade below an A-minus. My parents had high expectations about our professional future as well. They expected us to choose one of two prestigious career paths, doctor or lawyer. Even though I maintained an A average in all of my classes in middle school, I had a real aptitude for math and science, which is why my parents tried to steer me toward medicine. ER was one of my favorite TV shows.

  The philosophy behind these pre-college summer programs was to get minority children on a college prep track as soon as possible. Not only did we have advanced academic classes, we were also taught time-management skills, essay writing, and public speaking. I loved it. The teachers taught us about how to apply for college admission and financial aid. They didn’t promise us anything, but they told us if we worked hard and took advantage of every opportunity presented to us, we would succeed.

  The first summer I attended the program I met a girl named Damaris. She lived in South Orange, a neighboring town to Maplewood. Damaris’s mother was Black and her father was Filipino. She had golden honey skin, almost the same color as mine, and a ready smile. Despite her biracial background, Damaris strongly identified as Black. She was always quoting famous Black writers and activists. We had almost every class together that summer, and we managed to become close friends in a short time. I loved the fact that Damaris was Black like me, smart, and also reveled in spending her summer learning about cell reproduction and the best way to solve algebraic inequalities. She didn’t care that I was a Muslim and didn’t need me to catch her up on Muslim Basics 101 because she had a cousin who was Muslim. Damaris was the kind of friend I wished I had in middle school.

  “I wish you could transfer to my school for eighth grade,” I told Damaris on the phone one night.

  “Yeah, that would be great,” Damaris said. “But at least we’ll be in high school together for four years,” she said, always one to find the bright side of matters. “And when we are, you can also meet my friends Nicole and Ana. You’ll like them, too.”

  If Damaris’s friends were anything like her, I knew I’d like them. I still had one more year at Maplewood Middle School, and sometimes I couldn’t help but wish I could skip the last year of middle school.

  “You can do it, Ibtihaj,” Damaris said, when I shared this thought with her. I’d told her about some of the bullying I’d faced. “You’re stronger than you think, and you’re crazy smart. As my mom always says, ‘our ancestors fought too hard for us to give up now.’”

  I smiled from the other end of the phone. Damaris was the best.

  Even though I didn’t tell my mother about every single time someone was mean to me at school, she wasn’t unaware of my feelings of isolation. She knew I yearned to fit in with my classmates and on the school softball team. She had witnessed some of the cattiness at the mosque that I had to deal with, too. At the masjid we attended, there was a general sense that the kids who went to public school instead of a private Islamic school would probably be drinking, partying, and getting pregnant before they made it out of high school. As a public school kid, I had to fight against that stereotype. My mother shook her head in disappointment whenever she heard about “that nonsense,” as she called it. “Those kids don’t know what they’re talking about, and their parents should be ashamed of themselves for letting them think that way,” she said. I was told to ignore anyone who held such ridiculous beliefs.

  At the end of the day, I had to put my trust in my parents and believe them when they said that if I just worked hard and focused on my studies, then everything would work itself out. That trust helped me survive my first years in hijab and middle school. My mom did her part, too. She was constantly on the lookout for activities and classes that would be good for me and my developing sense of identity.

  One day, during the fall of my eighth-grade year, my mom and I were on our way to pick up Qareeb from school. He was a freshman now at Columbia High School, the same school I would be attending the following year. I soaked up every detail I could during those pickups, trying to get a sense of what high school would be like. At home Qareeb was a typical big brother, and when I pressed for information he gave me monosyllabic answers to my questions.

  “Are the kids nice?” I’d ask.

  “Yeah,” he would say.

  “Are the classes harder?”

  “Sort of,” Qareeb would tell me before banishing me from his room.

  As we pulled up to the front of his school, my mom poked me on the arm and pointed toward the windows in front. “What do you think they’re doing in there?” she said, craning her neck to get a better view of what looked like a bunch of kids sword fighting in the school cafeteria.

  I rolled my window down to get a better view, but all I could see was a bunch of kids wearing white pants, white jackets, and what looked like masks, moving around with long, thin swords.

  “I have no idea,” I said, uninterested in whatever activity was taking place in there. My mind was busy with other things, like whether I’d still be the only kid wearing a hijab in high school and what classes I’d be able to take. My mom was looking at the kids in the cafeteria, but I was scanning the high school girls pouring out of the massive building.

  “It looks like some kind of sports practice. And all the kids are covered up, Ibtihaj!” Mom said, still trying to see into the window. But then Qareeb jumped in the car, and we had to pull out of the schoolyard.

  “Qareeb, do you know what they’re practicing there in the cafeteria?” Mom asked. Her sports antennae were buzzing.

  Qareeb gave a quick turn of his head to see what my mom was referring to and then said, “Oh, yeah. That’s the fencing team. I don’t know anything about it.”

  That night, my mom went online and discovered that Columbia High School had one of the best fencing programs in the state, which was a significant honor, because apparently New Jersey had the largest number of high school fencers in the country. The most intriguing information she found was that although many people claim that fencing originated in Europe—specifically in Italy and Germany—historians have found cave paintings depicting early sword fighting back in 1190 BC in Luxor, Egypt. Fencing didn’t originate as a sport; it was a method of defense used by soldiers in the military and against enemies at war. Then in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Europeans began to consider learning swordplay to be a fashionable and necessary part of a gentleman’s education; it became divorced from violence and transformed more into a show of athleticism. With the invention of the wire-mesh helmet and a sword with a blunted tip, accidental deaths and injuries became less common, and fencing was featured in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in 1896. It was originally a male-only sport; women’s fencing was not introduced into the Olympic Games until the 1924 games in Paris.

  The more my mother read about the Columbia High School team and the sport of fencing, the more boxes it checked off her list. A winning team? Check. A uniform where Ibtihaj would be totally covered without having to alter the uniform in any way? Check. An opportunity to participate in a sport that wouldn’t require Mom and Dad to drive her to practice? Check. There was only one problem with fencing. No one in our family knew the first thing about the sport. Even though my father was the major sports fan, he told my mom that fencing was not in his repertoire. But this did not stop my mother. There was never a problem she couldn’t solve. By the time I came down for breakfast the next day, Mommy had tracked down none other than the coach for the Columbia High School fencing team, and I had a private lesson scheduled for the following week.

  I don’t think my parents would normally send me to a strange man’s house to learn how to fi
ght with a sword, but Frank Mustilli wasn’t exactly a strange man. He was more of a legend in the local fencing community. Coach Mustilli had been a college fencing champion at Montclair State College during his junior and senior years. Now, he was the president of a small bank in South Orange, but fencing was still his passion. What’s more, both of his daughters were successful college fencers, and there was talk that the elder daughter might make it all the way to the Olympics. Clearly this man knew what he was doing.

  My father and I went to see Coach Mustilli on a Saturday morning. On the short drive over, hardly a word was said in the car as both my father and I were lost in our thoughts. Neither one of us knew what to expect. We parked in the front of the coach’s redbrick house, and before we could get to the front door, a short white man with thick, shiny black hair and wire-framed glasses wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants came out to greet us. “I’m Frank Mustilli,” he said, extending a hand to my dad. And then he turned to me.

  “How do you pronounce your name, young lady?”

  “It’s Ibtihaj,” I said shyly.

  “Ibtihaj,” he repeated. “That’s an interesting name. I like it. Now let’s go get started.”

  The coach led us down his long driveway to the garage. “I have a whole setup in here,” he said, pushing the button on a gadget to open the garage door. Inside, the garage looked like a mini gymnasium. There were a bunch of swords balanced in a rack that looked like an umbrella stand, a long narrow strip painted on the floor, and some bright red electrical boxes that I later found out were used to attach to the swords to track points.

  “Come on over here, Ibtihaj,” Coach Mustilli said, smiling. “We only have thirty minutes, so let’s get right to it.”

  My dad found a chair in the corner and sat down.

  “Ibtihaj, first lesson: fencing is like physical chess—you have to be strong and strategic,” the coach said. I nodded and tried to keep the words “strong” and “strategic” in the forefront of my mind, but I was nervous. I think I was already sweating, and we hadn’t even started moving yet. But this was my first one-on-one lesson, and I didn’t feel comfortable in such close proximity to an adult male who wasn’t related to me. I was used to learning sports with a group of kids on a field or a track—not in some garage with me as the center of attention.